Go ahead and say that San Cristóbal de los Ángeles has never been nor is it a marginal neighborhood, but one of working-class people. Metro and Cercanías stations and bus shelters are packed to capacity during peak hours on weekdays. But this neighborhood of 27,000 inhabitants, with one of the lowest incomes in Madrid and where street cleaning seems like a utopia (children play among paper and the few street sweepers are unable to cope), has been mired for weeks in the sustained chaos that has been brought the mafias of the new narco-stories.
The law of silence exudes in many corners, especially in the interblock areas; a silence of double standards: the one that gives impunity to having drug sales points on hand to shoot and that of those who have no choice but to live, with fear and disgust, among so much filth. Prado de la Mata is one of the historical neighborhood leaders of Madrid. This woman of conviction spent time as an IU councilor trying to put at the center of the political debate that the south also exists beyond a verse by Benedetti.
Now, his health does not allow him to continue presiding over the neighborhood association, but he continues without holding his tongue. Because there are spokespersons who, despite everything they have seen and experienced, are afraid to show their faces when the enemy is the drug traffickers: «In San Cristóbal, we feel institutionally abandoned by everyone; For example, there are no Christmas lights because they say in the town hall that they have had problems with the company. Of course, there is a lot of presence of the National Police. The Government delegate has come and work is being done from the Villaverde District Board. But everything is going so slowly, it seems like they can’t keep up,” De la Mata explains to this newspaper.
According to police sources, in recent times there have been around thirty entries and searches in San Cristóbal for this type of matter. What’s more, there is an increase in troops, and greater provision of resources, in addition to “a constant analysis of the situation to achieve maximum effectiveness in police actions.”
Police reinforcement
From Citizen Participation of the Usera-Villaverde police station (both territories share a police district, one of the most complicated in the capital) “monthly meetings are constant” with neighborhood, cultural, business and teaching associations. On the part of Citizen Security, they indicate that the police presence is continuous, both in uniform and in civilian clothes. And, at the level of the Judicial Police, “investigations into these crimes against public health have been intensified.” The work of surveillance and control of crime does not stop, but the solution to this scourge requires a multifactorial approach, not just a repressive one.
20 years ago the slogan “San Cristóbal is not the Bronx of Madrid” came out, a banner with which thousands of residents came out to demonstrate when the problems were illegal car racing and the movement of drug addicts in the last ones that used the neighborhood and its Cercanías station as a gorge to reach the nearby settlement of El Salobral, then the largest in the country, where cocaine and heroin were shipped, and which almost no one remembers today. The administrations involved then, City hall and Community of Madridthey took action and destroyed the shacks in a few months, after the neighbors cried out. They were other times. Now, San Cristóbal is not a place of passage; It’s the place. Days ago, they took to the streets again to protest “for a neighborhood to live in.”
It is 12:30 on a Tuesday in early December and, at a small roundabout on Godella Street, a white car arrives, a somewhat old model, and the driver only has to wait ten seconds in the middle of the roundabout. Three drug addicts appear like three zombies, leaving a stench of putrefaction in their wake. Quickly, they get into the car, which is still one of those ‘cundas’ or ‘drug taxis’ that until now were seen leaving from Embajadores or Sierra de Guadalupe towards towns like Cañada Real and, before, the extinct Barranquillas. Five euros per passenger per trip, with the only destination being the window of a ground floor, squatted, of course. The drug traffickers pay the driver based on microns or even trash.
Last September, after years of comings and goings (with different entries and searches and even kidnapping of minors to sell them sexually), the narco flats on San Dalmacio Street, in an industrial estate in Villaverde, ended for the moment.
The clans of the Cañada Real
But drugs are like energy or bad music: they are not destroyed, they are transformed. And now those who ran those points of sale, in these cases Dominicans, have moved to nearby San Cristóbal. In this criminal structure there is no shortage of those from the immediately higher echelon, which are the long-standing clans that rule in the Cañada Real; But the police coups and the tendency for them to be accompanied by demolitions of their bunkers are making the Jiménez, the Gordos, the Fernández, the Emilio, the Bruno and other relatives diversify in two directions: the usual drugs, coca, horse and crack, in addition to hypnosedatives, ‘tusi’, mephedrone and MDMA, to the drug houses in disadvantaged neighborhoods (such as Caño Roto, like Lavapiés, like Villaverde, like Puente de Vallecas, like Tetuán…); and take advantage, on the other hand, of the wealth of marijuana plantations, so cheap to maintain (and little punishable) and so easy to sell to Chinese mafias to take them out of Spain towards the United Kingdom and countries in central and northern Europe, where they are paid at the price of gold bars.
Until a few days ago, to complete the disaster, a drug addict camp had been set up on the bridge of one of the accesses to San Cristóbal from Andalucía Avenue. On the route of schools and shops. There, the authorities did not turn a deaf ear and it was dismantled.
But breaking up a drug ring takes much more work and time. Those who traffic know that it is very profitable for them. On the one hand, they are squatted apartments (windows and balconies boarded up with bricks proliferate in the neighborhood, revealing their most immediate past). And, furthermore, since they are officially homes, the Constitution protects them by the right to the inviolability of the home; At least, until an investigation fills the office of a judge with evidence that the agents convince after months of surveillance that one does not live there, but rather that one is going to die. Because it really is the ‘headquarters’ of a business called drug trafficking. In 2023, there were 97 searches in Madrid (62 in the capital), with 244 arrested and 41 kilos of cocaine, 67 of hashish and 73 of marijuana seized; pocket change for everything that moves.
San Cristóbal now has its own map of narco-flats: Godella Street, 127 (a ground floor); Godella, 136 (a third); Godella, 173, on a fifth floor; and Rocafort, 24 (another bass). “But there is a building at the beginning of Moncada Street where it is sold in almost all the homes,” explain, very quietly, two extremely young girls who are taking care of a baby with its stroller. «Yes, we are afraid when passing through here. “The drug addicts are always fighting and shouting among themselves, in their language,” they manage to say, and then go into the doorway of Godella, 127, where they live.
At the back of this building is where drug addicts keep gathering, some old enough to go to class, but physically punished like those who rowed in galleys, to hit the blinds of one of the ground floors. A VTC also stops next door, whose driver takes advantage of a break to grab something. They are served through a window from which you can barely see the mess of a bedroom with bunk beds.
“There is no right to live like this”
A septuagenarian, in charge of a hardware store right next door, has to “put up with junkies passing by the business all day long.” One of them takes advantage of the inattention during the conversation with ABC to approach from behind and grab a bag from the ground with no one really knows what is inside, and carry it a few meters away like a dog hides its prey. «The Police have told us that, as soon as we see anything strange, we should call them. And that’s what we do, because there is no right to live like that,” he complains.
A patrol does not stop passing through the area, full of people who look like ‘zombies’. They identify suspects, circulate through the hottest streets, try to dissuade buyers and spoil the party a little for the dealers. There is no shortage, among so much misery, of a betting house, more crowded than a bar at aperitif time.
The parade of women with little clothing and many bags under their eyes attracts attention. “There are more and more prostituted girls from Marconi who cross Andalucía Avenue and come to the narco flats here to buy their fix,” says José, a lifelong neighbor who agrees with Prado de la Mata in this diagnosis. The polygon on the other side of the road has been converted into a warehouse for the sale and consumption of trafficking in women for decades. Although the problem has eased in the area closest to Marconi’s homes, a few warehouses further away, in the area known as El Gato, are exploited without mercy.
“I know they are sick, but there is no right for us to find drug addicts on the landings of the blocks getting shots or sleeping in the doorways,” cries José in this corner of Madrid that also gets up early, sweats and pays taxes.
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